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Part One

On November 21, 2018, Dependra Pathak, director general of police in the Andamans and Nicobars, an archipelago of paradise islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, issued a press release headed “Death of US National.” Pathak, a short, mustached man with the paunch of 28 years’ service in the Indian police, wrote that his office in the island capital of Port Blair had received an e-mail two days earlier from the U.S. consulate in Chennai, 850 miles away on the mainland. The consulate, Pathak said, had been contacted by an American woman, the mother of “one Mr. John Allen Chau … about her son’s visit to North Sentinel Island and attack by the tribesmen.” Upon receiving the e-mail, “a missing report was immediately registered” and a “detailed enquiry was initiated.” Within hours, Pathak’s detectives reported back that Chau “allegedly got killed at North Sentinel Island during his misplaced adventure in the highly restricted area while trying to interact with the uncontacted people who have a history of vigorous rejection towards outsiders.”

What Pathak did not say, because Port Blair’s small press corps already knew, was that, aside from Chau, almost no outsider had ever set foot on North Sentinel. That in itself did not make the island unusual. The Andamans and Nicobars are a lost world, 836 islands of mangroves, rainforests, and crescent-moon beaches stretching for 480 miles where the Bay of Bengal meets the Andaman Sea in the warm waters between India, Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia. Only 31 islands are inhabited. Living alongside Indian settlers are six protected indigenous tribes that for thousands of years have existed apart from the rest of humanity, spearing fish and turtles and shooting wild pigs with bows and arrows. This includes the people of North Sentinel, whose reputation for killing anyone who lands on their tiny island ensures that they are the world’s most isolated people.

Almost nothing is known about the Sentinelese. From their appearance, they are African. The theory is that, like three other black tribes on the Andamans, they are descended from people who migrated from the Cradle of Humankind in Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Some of them settled on a mountain range that once connected to Myanmar. Around 10,000 B.C., when the ice caps melted and the sea rose, those mountains became islands, sealing the tribes off from the world. For anthropologists, the existence of black hunter-gatherers in Asia is a wonder. For the religious, it’s a miracle: Adam and Eve, living as God created them.

Pathak wrote that he had directed the coast guard to fly over North Sentinel and a second group of officers to sail past in a patrol boat. Neither saw any sign of Chau. The evidence of the American’s death came from statements by five fishermen who first reported him missing. The men said that they had dropped him off close to shore on November 16. Returning a day later, they saw “a dead person being buried at the shore which from the silhouette of the body, clothing and circumstances appeared to be the body of John Allen Chau.” Pathak had arrested all five fishermen, plus two more men from Port Blair, all of whom, he wrote, helped Chau travel to North Sentinel despite knowing “fully well about the illegality of the action and the hostile attitude of the Sentinelese tribesmen to the outsiders.” In their defense, the fishermen stated that “the deceased … without any pressure or undue influence from any corner, had volunteered to visit North Sentinel Island for preaching Christianity to the aboriginal tribe.”

Pathak headlined his release URGENT. Still, he was probably surprised by its impact. Within a day, journalists around the world were mesmerizing the public with the story of how a 26-year-old American missionary had been killed by a Stone Age tribe on a remote island. Thousands of commentators weighed in, with a near unanimous verdict. The idea that people still lived seminaked in the forest, sustained by what they could hunt with bows and spears, was enchanting. The idea that missionaries were still venturing into the jungle to convert them was outrageous and probably racist. Stephen Corry, director of the indigenous-advocacy group Survival International, that whole populations of remote people “are being wiped out by violence from outsiders who steal their land and resources, and by diseases like the flu and measles to which they have no resistance.” Chau might have infected them even in death. No wonder the Sentinelese, Corry said, had “shown again and again that they want to be left alone.”

In a stream of tweets, takes, and TV segments over the months that followed, Chau was characterized at best as a dumbass backpacker and at worst as a Christian supremacist indifferent to genocide. His ignoring the tribe’s wish to be left alone and the risks he posed to them were attributed to imperialist arrogance. His attempt to “save” the Sentinelese was ascribed to delusion and brainwashing. In a on his Instagram page, his family expressed forgiveness for his killers, saying that Chau “had nothing but love for the Sentinelese,” while in the family’s only other public comment, his father, Patrick, seemed to support comparisons between his son and suicidal jihadis, that “extreme Christianity” led his son to his “not unexpected end.” Twitter reckoned that Chau deserved to die. Others found humor in his demise. Four thousand Google reviewers wrote about North Sentinel, praising the island’s beauty but questioning the cuisine (“my right leg was … still a bit raw”) and service (“we kept being interrupted by arrows”). In late December, comedian Frankie Boyle wrapped up his prime-time show on the BBC with a imagining a Sentinelese warrior splitting Chau’s penis in half, speculating that his rib cage was now being used as “a monkey’s xylophone,” and suggesting that John Allen Chau would achieve immortality as “the patron saint of daft cunts.”

Lost in this festival of scorn was much sense of the young man who journeyed to the edge of the world only to die there. Who was John Chau? What was he looking for? What did he find?

Journal entry

November 14, 2018

Port Blair

I’ve been in a safehouse in Port Blair since returning from Hut Bay, Little Andaman, for the past 11 days! I hadn’t seen any full sunlight till today and my nice tan I had acquired started to fade, as well as my thickly callused feet. The benefit of that is that I was essentially in quarantine. I met last night with the fishermen who are all believers and who agreed to drop me off. The meeting went well—I trust them. The drop-zone was pointed out on the map as being a cove on the SW of the island and I depart in three or so hours. The plan is to link up with the crew and depart tonight, arriving at the shore around 0400. From there we make progressive contact with fish as gifts over the next few days, then send me off. Depending on the darkness, I might land briefly and bury and cache a pelican case for later. We might even send the kayak laden with gifts towards shore.

Soli Deo Gloria!

John Chau was the son of an unlikely couple, Patrick Chau and Lynda Adams-Chau. Patrick is a Chinese American success story. Born in Guangzhou in 1952, he had been training to be an artist when, in 1968, amid the turmoil of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he was forced onto a communal farm and made to work ten hours a day, seven days a week, for six years. In 1974, Patrick’s father secured his son’s passage to Hong Kong. Two years later, Patrick emigrated to the United States, working odd jobs in Los Angeles and learning English from the radio before being accepted to study chemistry at the University of Southern California.

In 1983, Patrick won an Army scholarship to attend medical school at Oral Roberts University, an evangelical college in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Patrick applied himself to his new religion as assiduously as his studies, reading the Bible, learning how to construct religious arguments, and declaring himself a Christian. Though never quite comfortable with ORU’s evangelism, he found that at its medical school “no one cared about your religion as long as you do your work.” In Tulsa he met Lynda Adams, an ORU professor who taught social work, at a Christmas party. The couple married in 1985, and Lynda gave birth to Brian in 1986. Patrick graduated from med school at 35 in 1988. Marilyn was born in early 1989 around the time that the family moved to Alabama for Patrick to begin his psychiatric residency. In 1991, Patrick deployed to the Gulf War as an army reservist. Soon after he returned, Lynda gave birth to John.

While Lynda was devout, Patrick’s faith had more practical foundations. He retained an attachment to Confucianism, but Christianity had given him an education, a profession, and a family, and he was happy for it to guide his wife and children. When Patrick opened a psychiatry practice in Vancouver, Washington, Lynda became an organizer for the Christian fellowship Chi Alpha at Washington State University’s local campus, and their three children attended a private school, Vancouver Christian. Patrick saw no conflict between faith and science, and he enjoyed debating religious doctrine the same as he would a medical text. Brian and Marilyn inherited their father’s pragmatic conformism and, in near identical careers, studied premed at ORU, then medicine at Loma Linda University, a school founded by Seventh-day Adventists in Southern California. They both became disability specialists focusing on veterans.

John took after his father’s more wistful side. Patrick still painted, filling the family home with idyllic landscapes: a single cabin in the mountains with smoke pluming from its chimney, or a lone figure in a canoe paddling through the wilderness. Years later, John wrote about a of a three-masted ship on a stormy sea that his father completed the year he was born. “When I was a kid, I used to gaze constantly at this,” he said. “After reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the first thing I did was to put my hand on the painting to see if I could enter into the world of Narnia. … I think this painting helped spark adventure in my young soul.”

On weekends, Patrick and Lynda took their children camping and hiking in the hills and woods around Vancouver. In a memorial essay that he distributed to friends after John’s death, Patrick said that when his son was younger, he was obsessed with BB-gun war games, forming his own team when he entered high school. But as John grew older, he was increasingly drawn to the sense of the divine that he felt when surrounded by untrammeled wilderness. “Why do I hike?” he years later. “To see but a brief glimpse of the Glory of the Creator.”

Patrick remembers John first mentioning living on a desert island at the age of ten. It was 2002, John had read Robinson Crusoe, and the family was on vacation in Hawaii when John announced that one day he wanted to live in a place exactly like that, swinging through the trees, jumping into the water, and spearing jellyfish. Patrick had laughed. But the notion of island life stuck with John, and over the years Patrick watched his son refine and reinforce his ambition.

In 2008, as a junior in high school, John traveled to Mexico on a school mission to help build an orphanage. He enjoyed meeting new people, and the experience made him wonder what the ultimate version of such a trip might be. On his return to Vancouver, John began a search for the most remote tribes on earth, which soon turned up a string of islands in the Indian Ocean. John read how for thousands of years, the tribes on the Andamans and Nicobars had cut themselves off from the world. As far back as the second century A.D., the Egyptian geographer Ptolemy wrote about “an island of Cannibals” in the archipelago. In the 13th century, “no better than wild beasts … heads like dogs and teeth and eyes likewise … a most cruel generation [who] eat everybody that they can catch, if not of their own race.”

After establishing a settlement on the Andamans in the mid-19th century, the British identified five separate “Negrito” tribes and, on the more southern Nicobars, two “Mongoloid” groups from Asia. Inevitably, the colonialists devastated the tribes’ numbers along with their solitude. By the 1930s, one Andamanese tribe, the Jangil, was extinct. Three others—the Great Andamanese, the Onge, and the Jarawa—had suffered a population collapse from several thousand to a few hundred. The only people to survive untouched were the hundred or so souls thought to be living on North Sentinel, the name that Britain gave the small square island, just five miles long and four miles across, that marked the northern sea approach to its new administrative capital, Port Blair. That a people had managed to live alone in the wilderness for so long was a marvel to John. Patrick described how when John “finally found the last frontier of unexplored land and people untouched by Christianity, he was excited, as if the place and the people were specifically left for him.”

Journal entry

November 15, 2018

North Sentinel

Rendezvoused successfully last night with the friends. Currently on the boat, waiting to make contact. Left around 2000 and arrived around 2230 but as we went north along the eastern shore, we saw boat lights in the distance and turned around, headed south and evaded them. All along the way, our boat was highlighted by bioluminescent plankton—and as fish jumped nearby, we could see them like darting mermaids shimmering along. The Milky Way was above and God Himself was shielding us from the coastguard and navy patrols. At 0430, we entered the cove on the western shore and as the sun began to light the east, me and two of the guys jumped in the shallows and brought my two pelicans and kayak onto the northern point of the cove. The dead coral is sharp and I already got a slight scratch on my right leg. Now we see a Sentinel islander house and are waiting for them to come out. We also saw three large fires on the eastern shore last night.

Soli Deo Gloria

Seventeen years ago, I also went looking for the tribes of the Andamans. Like John, I’d been a backpacker in my twenties. In my thirties, I became a foreign correspondent as a way to stay on the road and get paid for it. In 2002, I moved to India and met an anthropologist who told me an astonishing story about a group of Neolithic tribes still living on remote Indian Ocean islands. Meeting them became my obsession.

As John had, I hoarded information about the Andamans. Like him, I was less interested in the science or history of indigenous peoples than in the adventure they promised. For several years, I made repeated furtive attempts to reach them. I was questioned by officials in Port Blair, had a shoving match with a policeman who was following me, and was eventually asked to leave the islands. I gave up only after I moved to Africa in 2006.

One reason, I think, that Patrick and a handful of John’s friends spoke with me in the months after his death, breaking a silence they imposed in the face of the coverage he received, was that I had my own experience with the islands. I recognized the giddiness in John’s journal, the way the islands seemed to offer something big and difficult and dangerous and extraordinary.

Where John and I differed was that while I had been a reporter pursuing a story, John wanted to be the story. By his late teens, he had progressed far beyond Robinson Crusoe. He devoured books on iconic missionaries like David Livingstone in Africa. Jim Elliot, speared to death at age 28, along with four other Americans, by the Huaorani people in Ecuador in 1956, was a particular role model. The missionary was raised within walking distance of the Chau family home, just across the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon. As John grew up, the legend of the local hero killed by savages swelled. Elliot’s story was told in several books, a documentary in 2002, and a movie in 2005.

There were parallels, too, between the Huaorani and the Sentinelese. Both tribes had almost no contact with the outside world. Both seemed to have ambiguous attitudes toward outsiders. Before killing Elliot and his friends, the Huaorani exchanged gifts with them, and one tribesman even took a ride in their plane. The Sentinelese reputation for aggression was reinforced in 1981 when dozens of armed warriors tried to surround a beached freighter that had run aground, forcing the crew to radio for an airlift. (Metal salvaged from the ship is thought to be the source of the iron tips on the Sentinelese’s arrows and spears.) In 2004, a lone bowman tried to shoot down a coast guard helicopter, and two years later the Sentinelese killed a pair of Indian crab fishermen who drifted ashore. But John also knew that since 1967, Indian anthropologists had been enjoying brief, nonviolent excursions, pulling up close in boats and dropping coconuts in the surf. The Sentinelese would approach unarmed, scoop up the coconuts, and even briefly board the boats.

Despite these encouraging signs, there was no doubt that an expedition to North Sentinel could be fatal. There was no question, either, that this was what made the idea so heroic. The power of Elliot’s legacy stemmed largely from his murder. A passage from his journal in 1949 is taken by many missionaries as proof that Elliot knew the risks and went anyway, regarding self-­sacrifice as virtuous and even logical. “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose,” he .

John found such sentiments inspiring. To Patrick, they were alarming. One day in 2009, when Patrick overheard his 17-year-old son telling friends that reaching North Sentinel was his calling and his mission, Patrick’s heart sank. He knew that his son’s calling was based on fantasy.

Journal entry

November 15, 2018

North Sentinel Island, Southwest Cove

Around 0830, I tried initiating contact. I went back to the cached kayak and built it up, then round to the boat and got two large fish—one barracuda and one half GT/tuna. I put them on the kayak and began waving to the house we had seen. As I was about 400 yds out, I heard women looing and chattering. Then I spotted two dugout canoes with outriggers. I rowed past one, then saw movement on shore. Two armed Sentinelese came rushing out yelling at me—they had two arrows each, unstrung, until they got closer. I hollered “My name is John. I love you and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you. Here is some fish!”

I regret I began to panic slightly as I saw them string arrows in their bows. I picked up the GT/tuna and threw it toward them. They kept coming. I slid the barracuda off. It started to sink but my thoughts were directed toward the fact I was almost in arrow range. I backpaddled. When they got the fish, I turned and paddled like I never have in my life, back to the boat. 

I felt some fear but mostly was disappointed they didn’t accept me right away. I can now say I’ve been nearly shot by the Sentinelese and I’ve walked and cached gear on their island. Now I’m resting in the boat and will try again later, leaving gifts on shore and in rocks. Lord protect me and guide me.

As John entered his twenties, Patrick had reasons to hope that his son would change course before it was too late. John followed the family example by heading to ORU to study health and physical education, and he hinted to his parents that he was considering a career in medicine.

But John’s preoccupation was hiking, climbing, fishing, and kayaking. In Tulsa he would escape whenever he could, fishing on his lunch break and on weekends bouldering, trekking, and paddling around the Ozarks. Some trips took him farther afield. In 2012, John had traveled to Cape Town as part of an ORU mission trip, and in 2013 he returned for three months. After graduating in 2014, John traveled to Kurdistan with More than a Game, a Christian soccer charity, then headed back to Cape Town for a third stint there. By the summer of 2015, John seemed to have decided to live as much of his life outdoors as possible. He qualified as a wilderness medic. He led trekking expeditions around Mount Adams in Washington. For three years, beginning in 2016, he worked for six months as a park guide in Northern California, basing himself at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, where he lived in a one-room cabin owned by the National Park Service.

More and more, John was choosing to experience the outdoors alone. He backpacked solo around South Africa and India. Back in the U.S., he made treks around Whiskeytown and along California’s Lost Coast, spending days by himself. At times, John complained of loneliness. “One thing I learned for certain: man was not made to be alone,” he after an 11-day hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2014. But his compulsion for the wilderness often found him heading out unaccompanied. He started a blog called That Solitary Path. He filled his Instagram feed with pictures of empty tracks heading into the hills, tiny tents in vast landscapes, and one-man campsites high up in the snow, his hiking gear artfully arranged in the foreground.

To his few hundred followers, John’s life appeared to be that of a bold outdoorsman. He called himself an explorer, and his posts depicted an existence almost continuously on the road, chasing down a new peak or trekking route or ice-cold swimming hole in a hidden mountain ravine. He liked to pose for selfies as if roaring and tell stories of close escapes, such as making it off the Cascades as a wildfire closed in and recovering from a rattlesnake bite. His descriptions of his ethnicity—he wrote “part Irish, part native American (Choctaw), part African, and part Chinese and southeast Asian” in his journal—suggested he was experimenting with a more complex and worldly identity. On Instagram, he presented himself as the consummate trail bro. He was almost always “super stoked” by the prospect of a “super rad” hike with a fellow “wildman” or “legends.” “Dang,” his followers would comment. “Legit, bro.”

Only rarely did the mask slip. “Ah man, don’t envy it,” he to one admirer. “It’s hard, and the pics only show the good parts.” In truth, John was censoring more than his moods. In his first posts, he quoted psalms and missionaries. But after his first trip to the Andamans in 2015, he cut back on references to his beliefs, mostly confining himself to the cryptic Latin hashtag #SoliDeoGloria, “Glory to God alone.” On the Andamans, his posts of beaches and scuba dives suggested that his trip was just one more adventure. In Chennai, en route to his first stay on the islands, he met Elkanah Jebasingh, 25, a machine-learning specialist for Amazon’s Alexa program. The pair would connect whenever John passed through, a total of four times by October 2018. John appeared “quite open,” Elkanah recalls. “He showed his face to people.” After John’s death, when Elkanah read about his friend’s true reason for being on the islands, he was stunned. All that John had told him was that he had friends in the Andamans. “He never told me anything about his mission.”

John’s reticence reflected a conscious hardening of his faith. From his late teens, Patrick wrote, his son countenanced no “questioning or criticizing” of “this adventure of evangelism.” Patrick felt “excluded from any input.” In his journal, John asked God to “please continue to keep all of us involved hidden from the physical and spiritual forces who desire to keep the people here in darkness.” John’s rad life wasn’t exactly a front, but it hid his clandestine objective. Patrick concluded that John’s prior exploits were all in preparation for Sentinel Island.

By late 2016, Patrick felt that time was running out to try and stop his son. John had made a second trip to the Andamans and seemed more determined than ever. Brian, who found his brother’s single-mindedness just as disturbing, told his father that there was “no way to change his stubborn mind.” Patrick decided that he had to try. He confronted his son, telling him that what to him might seem like righteous commitment was evidence to anyone else of a trapped and blinkered mind. “In my observation, he was selectively collecting whatever preacher’s doctrines were in favour of his self-directed, self-governed, self-appointed plan,” he wrote.

John stuck to his belief that it was his duty to go to North Sentinel. The islanders were damned to “eternal fire” if they never heard the Gospel, and as an outdoorsman with a knack for making friends in new places, John was one of the few souls in Christendom who could save them. It felt ordained, John said, like God was calling him. Patrick believed his son was deceiving himself. This wasn’t just about helping the Sentinelese or obeying God. This was about John’s Messiah complex. He described his son as a victim of fantasies, fanatacism, and extremism.

The argument ended without resolution, and Patrick never raised the matter again. But for the next two years he was haunted by their quarrel—and by John’s certainty. He was never able to shake the feeling that he was watching his son walk calmly and confidently toward his own death.

Part Two

To reach the Andamans, you fly to India’s east coast, then continue toward the horizon. The islands appear out of the ocean after two hours over open water—first one, then five, then dozens of dots of dark jungle ringed by bright halos of shallows. Only when the plane banks does a small settlement of rusted roofs and dusty roads appear at the end of a forested headland, the one sign of human habitation where otherwise there is only water, mudflats, beaches, and trees.

On the ground, Port Blair initially resembles any provincial Indian town. The slums are squeezed onto its highest, most distant hills. From there, tight alleys tumble down past orphanages and temples, past the A1 Chicken and Mutton Centre, past gold traders and haberdashers, before emerging at the wharves and open sewers of Junglee Ghat, where the last of the Great Andamanese warriors, defeated and ruined by ­disease, lived out their days. A closer look reveals a town struggling to impose itself. The roads are buckled. The walls are cracked and crumbling under black mold. The jetties have splintered under the assault of the dozens of cyclones and storms that roll in off the Bay of Bengal every year. The sense is of a place that could disappear at any moment.

Anyone researching the islands soon comes across the Hindi term kala pani, which translates as “black waters” and originates in a Hindu taboo on ocean voyages. The injunction contends that long-distance travel does not broaden the mind, as commonly supposed, but putrefies the character by exposing it to impurity. This view of exploration as corruption—either because what the traveler finds infects them, or perhaps because finding themselves so far from home, they hang up their moral compass—finds support in the long history of foreigners showing up on the islands and behaving abominably. Anthropologists speculate that the ancient hostility recorded by Ptolemy and Marco Polo was a reaction to slave raiders. That reasoned xenophobia was reinforced by British colonialists, who turned their muskets and cannons on the islanders, stole their land, then stood back as pestilence carried off most of the population.

A particularly grim example was Port Blair’s Cellular Jail, opened in 1906 to house Indian freedom fighters shipped off to rot. Built on a spur above town, the prison’s design was based on a panopticon, allowing wardens and doctors to see into every cell—the better to monitor medical experiments they conducted on inmates, such as measuring the efficacy of different malaria medicines. Among Indians, kala pani came to refer to the jail itself.

Perhaps no one fell so deeply under the islands’ spell as Maurice Vidal Portman, a minor English aristocrat and amateur anthropologist who was made Royal Navy officer in charge of the islands in 1879 when he was just 19. For two decades, Portman made ceaseless expeditions to find the various Andaman tribes, who he would kidnap and transport to Port Blair. Portman was an enthusiastic practitioner of “race science,” believing that intelligence could be gauged by measuring a subject’s cranium with calipers. Poor science cannot explain Portman’s additional recording of the size of islanders’ penises, breasts, and testicles; his evaluation of their “lustfulness” (which he equated with willfulness); and his photographs of naked tribesmen in classical poses. But his ambivalence about whether his subjects lived or died is explained by the view, common in Europe at the time, that the beings before him were so distantly of his species, they were best categorized as fauna. “They sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents,” Portman wrote of six Sentinelese he took to Port Blair. “This expedition was not a success. … We cannot be said to have done anything more than increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers.”

The end of colonialism was accompanied by evolving ideas about indigenous peoples. Among the theories gaining currency were those of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, a British researcher who visited the Andamans from 1906 to 1908, whose study of the tribes was foundational to the new discipline of social anthropology. Radcliffe-Brown rejected the notion that all societies followed the same path to progress and that the tribes were less advanced and thus inferior to Europeans. He proposed that the tribes’ hunter-gatherer lifestyle was best explained not by backwardness but by superior adaptation to their environment. Such ideas spelled the end of a consensus that racism had scientific justification, and the emergence of the notion that all human beings are of equal worth.